Children with life-threatening diseases often must undergo painful procedures. Procedures are invasive medical treatments and can be broadly categorized as mildly invasive, moderately invasive, or significantly/severely invasive. A mildly invasive procedure may cause some pain or discomfort, but it is usually limited in intensity and duration. Examples of mildly invasive procedures include, but are not limited to, shots and blood draws. Moderately invasive procedures can cause significant pain or discomfort and may require sedation in order to be performed. Examples of moderately invasive procedures include, but are not limited to, stitches and endoscopic procedures. Significantly or severely invasive procedures cause significant pain, both during the procedure, and during a post-operative convalescence period, and require sedation. Examples of severely invasive procedures include, but are not limited to, surgical procedures. Children are often stressed not only by the procedures, but by the anticipation of the procedure. Even receiving a shot or IV in preparation for a moderately or severely invasive procedure can cause stress for a child.
Additionally, there are many non-invasive procedures that impact children to a much greater degree than adults. For example, children are often scared or stressed by non-invasive diagnostic procedures, including, but not limited to, magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”), computer-aided tomography (“CAT”) scans, x-rays, electro-kardio grams (“EKG”). Children can also act adversely to chemotherapy. The side-effects of chemotherapy have undue impact on children because of the visible changes, such as loss of hair.
Due to the increase in children receiving medical procedures, many medical providers are trying to develop best-practices with regards to such treatment of children. Information about procedure pain in children is growing as there is increased interest and awareness among health care providers. It is important to think about pain control before the procedure begins, not after a child has become increasingly fearful and difficult to calm.
Research shows that managing both the anxiety of anticipating a procedure as well as the pain caused by the procedure itself is the best way to keep pain and anxiety under control. Solutions are often simple. A parent or trusted adult should remain with the child whenever possible. The child should have something that can reasonably distract them, refocusing their attention away from the procedure. A recent addition to the amelioration of pain and anxiety among children during medical procedures has been the use of some sort of token or memento to memorialize the procedures experienced by the child. Journey beads or tokens are especially popular during treatment of children that require serial procedures, such as chemotherapy, or other diseases in which the child undergoes procedures and diagnostics on a recurrent basis. A patient-child is given a new bead or token for each procedure or diagnostic, allowing the patient-child to acquire a collection of such beads or tokens. Such a collection can give the child comfort. The collection allows the child to feel esteem for their accomplishment, and it gives the child a physical manifestation to represent their progress.
Augmented reality offers a convenient way to reduce the anxiety and discomfort experienced by children in two ways. First, augmented reality can be used to distract children during a procedure. Second, augmented-reality-enabled (“ARE”) tokens can be serialized in order to memorialize a child's progress through serialized therapeutic procedures and diagnostics. For example, when a child has a series of blood draws or chemotherapy treatments for leukemia, the child can receive an ARE token for each individual procedure. Ideally, such a system would provide enhanced augmented reality with each ARE token the child acquires, allowing all of the child's ARE tokens to interoperate, thematically; and allowing for a non-linear improvement in the overall augmented reality presented to the child as the child acquires more ARE tokens.
Unfortunately, no such system currently exists. The limitations of current technology can be seen in that none of them are widely used in the serial medical treatment of children. This is an unserved market and problem, awaiting a solution.